“Anyone can speculate whether or not that would have meant the gentleman would have still been alive or not, no one knows,” De Clercq said. “Nobody wants to see this. The problem is the city doesn’t have the money anymore … and now it’s affecting public safety.”

Sanders praised fire officials for responding so quickly to the incident despite being handicapped by the brownout.

“There’s always going to be second-guessing,” he said. “I think it’s tragic that one individual is using this incident to make a political issue out of it.”

One thing that all sides agree on is that the fire department lacks the resources to cover a city the size of San Diego, regardless of whether brownouts are in effect.

A study by the Commission on Fire Accreditation International has shown that the city would need to add 22 fire stations to its stable of 47 to meet national standards.

The city also has a combined 59 fire vehicles — 47 engines and 12 trucks — a number that De Clercq said should be closer to 93. That lack of resources means the city only responds to 54 percent of all calls within five minutes, far below the 90 percent standard but a slight increase from the 50 percent response rate from 2006.

The brownout plan calls for up to eight stations to go without a fire engine on any given day to save $11.5 million annually by cutting overtime costs. Those fire crews are then used to fill vacancies elsewhere in the department and prevent overtime.

So why does the city have to send firetrucks and engines for medical calls?

The city, in partnership with a private company, has between 24 and 30 ambulances available at any given time. Firetrucks and engines — each with a paramedic and three emergency medical technicians — can, in most cases, get to the scene several minutes faster than an ambulance because of their placement throughout the city. Fire personnel are almost always the first responders and likely the difference between life and death in urgent cases.

A report to the council’s public safety committee on February’s brownouts showed that seven stations saw their response times get longer by four to 56 seconds compared with the same period a year earlier. The report analyzed more than 1,500 incidents responded to by those stations. It showed that a brownout at one station can create a ripple effect that leads to delays for fully staffed stations that have to pick up the slack.

For example, the Lincoln Park fire station had its engine sidelined Feb. 24 and its truck was busy helping someone who had trouble breathing. That led a Southcrest engine to respond to a second emergency in the Lincoln Park area, which led a Golden Hill engine to respond to a pregnancy in the Southcrest area.

Then the Southcrest engine, done with its previous emergency, had to respond to a heart-attack call in Golden Hill. The engine didn’t get there until 10 minutes after the call, and the patient was pronounced dead at the scene.